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. . . and it seem as though I could see my heart before my eyes, turning dark black with hate of rages, or harhequinade, stripped from that munner life leaving only naked being-hate. —Charles Starkweather On the Great Plains in March, the wind blows for days. Gutter pipes vibrate, shingles flap; things begin to come loose. Once they found old Miss Purdy wandering at midnight on U.S. 40, her dainty-laced nightgown billowing over her spindly, blue-gray thighs. It took three deputies to hold her down till the doctor arrived. On the Great Plains in March the dry elm scrapes at an upstairs window, dust devils swirl and disperse across the wide, empty fields, and a pistol shot sounds no louder than a screen door slapping on a porch.

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows. Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

Now in the West the slender moon lies low, And now Orion glimmers through the trees, Clearing the earth with even pace and slow, And now the stately-moving Pleiades, In that soft infinite darkness overhead Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread. And all the lonelier stars that have their place, Calm lamps within the distant southern sky, And planet-dust upon the edge of space, Look down upon the fretful world, and I Look up to outer vastness unafraid And see the stars which sang when earth was made.

In Legends of the Jews, Lewis Ginzberg writes that an Egyptian princess hung a tapestry woven with diamonds and pearls above King Solomon’s bed. When the king wanted to rise, he thought he saw stars and, believing it was night, slept on. Scaling ladders with buckets of white enamel, I painted the stars and the moon on my windowpanes to hold back days and nights. I yanked the telephone and stopped the wooden clock. The weeks a lightning stroke, desire turned to love. With my blue diamond, I sliced minutes in half and made days vanish, fooling the hours. I became so skillful at firmaments that miracles occurred: a bearded comet moved across the room breeding no omens, tearing no major kingdoms into small provinces, but there it was, reminding us that rock may spin and flare, lifting the senses, burning into sight. You eased pale hands away; I saw your shoulders recede through doorways, watched your image fail with your famished smile. I left our room with dream-filled eyes, and standing in the sun, I gazed at bricks and glass and saw, suddenly, flashing in stony light, the stars and the moon.

The silver hour drops— a spider on the mirror. * Silver the hour like drops of a spider’s mirror. * The silver drops, the spider’s hour, the mirror . . .

Perhaps is a new and sudden way of being. Like satisfaction not yet begun or some other kind of kindness: a more gentle one? Night makes us all into the middle of something until we aren't anything anymore. The sky isn't any color here. It's OK because consolation is color enough for your cheeks, wind bitten and glorified by the light of the wine in this glass draining toward a better time, a better space. I invented a notion of hell, and you invented a notion of hello. Amazing similarities and bizarrely coincidental snow Like a twig falling from an oak's tallest point, I keep wondering when forgiveness found its way into this world in a time before bargaining and beckoning. It's quiet again and now the sky is a tangled mess of rags seeking out the bored and unwilling. I'd like to make a map not of the land but of the path I took to arrive in this place, a map with no idealized purpose, a map of a thousand airless pines.

Massive and black the frigate birds, on brambles in the distance. Their bright red gular sacs, full as spinnaker sails billow from their feathers, like giant hearts of skin and air. They remind us of our own hearts, oversized and awkward, quivering in the lightest wind.

Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls, hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls. They scream revolt at what the body knows: all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no— another rose! another peony! break, flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow back through the crush of bodies, the lank air, to buses that inch us, sweating, across town. As though we were not dropped in silence there to trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low, the crickets counting summer's seconds down.

I like the part I play. They’ve cast me as Pompeii The day before the day. It’s my brilliant performance as a luxury man because I act that way. They say: Just wait, you’ll see, you’ll pay, Pompeii. You’re a miracle in a whirlpool In your blind date’s vagina At your age. Nothin could be fina. You eat off her bone china. Don’t be a ghoul. Don’t be a fool, You fool. In the lifelong month of May, Racing joyously on his moto poeta to the grave, He’s his own fabulous slave. He rides his superbike faster and faster to save His master from the coming lava from China, every day, But especially today, because it’s on its way. Fred Astaire is about to explode In his buff-colored kidskin gloves, revolving around The gold knob of his walking stick, with the sound Of Vesuvia playing, And the slopes of Vesuvia saying Her effluvia are in nearly overflowing mode. Freud had predicted Fred. In The Future of an Illusion he said: “Movies are, in other words, the future of God.” Nothing expresses ordinary wishes more dysplastically than current American politics do. Breast augmentation as a deterrent To too much government is odd. Korean women in a shop on Madison give a pedicure to Pompeii. Fred only knows that he’s not getting old. Pompeii doesn’t know it’s the day before the day. The governor of New York is legally blind, a metaphor for his state of mind. He ought to resign, but he hasn’t resigned. Good riddance, goodbye. The bell has tolled.

I, the scourge-wielder, balance-wrecker, Smiter with whips and swords; I, hater of the breakers of the law; I, legalist, inexorable and bitter, Driving the jury to hang the madman, Barry Holden, Was made as one dead by light too bright for eyes, And woke to face a Truth with bloody brow: Steel forceps fumbled by a doctor's hand Against my boy's head as he entered life Made him an idiot. I turned to books of science To care for him. That's how the world of those whose minds are sick Became my work in life, and all my world. Poor ruined boy! You were, at last, the potter And I and all my deeds of charity The vessels of your hand.